Our Experience in the Spiritual Exercises in Daily Life
Photo by Anthony Choren via Unsplash
As Rachel and I continue to invest in and develop our spiritual formation in marriage initiatives, we wanted to take a little time highlighting our own experience in praying through the Spiritual Exercises in Everyday Life together.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Spiritual Exercises, here’s a little run down. The Exercises were created in the 1500’s by Ignatius of Loyola. In their original design, they were prayed through over 30 days in an intensive retreat format, but the heart behind them has always been flexibility to help participants grow in their walk with God. Praying them in everyday life is more often the format utilized today. While it’s the same material, retreatants typically spend an hour or more praying each day over nine months so that they are still able to engage in their normal life (jobs, family, community, etc). The Exercises consist of 5 stages, traditionally called weeks (following the original 30-day format), but in the longer 9-month format each “week” lasts for several actual weeks. The stages are:
Preparatory stage (basking in God’s love and Ignatius’ “principle and foundation” of the Exercises)
Week 1- Seeing sin in the world and in our lives, especially in light of God’s love
Week 2- Following Jesus’ life and ministry
Week 3- Following Jesus to the cross
Week 4- Living with Jesus in light of the resurrection
Each day has a meditation to pray through (most of which are scripture passages), journaling, communing with God, and praying the Examen. The Exercises have been growing in prominence recently, especially among protestants, and they are proving to be a deep and transforming experience for many.
Rachel and I have been praying through them together and leading other couples through them, but I wanted to share a bit about our personal experience. Our format has been to pray through the Exercises individually and then on day 7, which is a “review” day, we offer a time of spiritual accompaniment to one another, giving space to review, process, invite deeper exploration, and hold one another in prayer. We are already 60% through the 9-month journey together.
Here are a few things we’ve experienced so far:
HAVING A PLAN IS NICE.
We have long been fans of a Rule of Life and help people craft them all the time. The Exercises have been our rule of life for the past nine months. We strive to pray them first thing in the morning, and we intentionally get up early so that we can engage them before our daughter wakes up. While it’s required discipline, we actually look forward to it everyday. (Though, I’ll be honest, there have been moments when getting up early just didn’t happen. Life with a toddler, amiright?)
Over the last five months, we have fallen in love with this daily rhythm, and it’s been nice to have a plan for time in prayer that we don’t have to come up with ourselves. The rhythm and material has been laid out, and our role is simply to engage the Lord in it. Some days feel more powerful than others, and some days we’re more alert than others, but it also feels like there is something happening over the consistency of time that is larger than each day's specific experience. Also knowing that there’s an end date feels helpful. The exercises are intensive and aren’t suited to every season of life, but we chose to engage them in a season that, while requiring effort and sacrifice, is also possible for this kind of commitment.
SOMETIMES LIFE GETS IN THE WAY, BUT WE ARE LEARNING THAT FORMATION HAPPENS IN THE DISRUPTION.
Our daughter went through a major sleep regression in the month of December. She’s typically been a good sleeper, which we are immensely grateful for, but as she approached the two-year mark, it would take up to an hour to finally get her down in bed, and then she’d wake up in the middle of the night and it would be a struggle to get her back to sleep. Then on mornings when we would still strive to wake up early, she would wake up to our footsteps (which never bothered her before) and need us.For many weeks, there were few spaces where we were awake and our daughter was asleep. We had to make adjustments each day to allow each other the time to pray.
It can be easy to think that this disruption was an intrusion on our experience in The Exercises and our pursuit of God (and also in our everyday life), and yet it was also an invitation to recognize that God was there with us in the disruption. When I would just be getting into my prayer time and I would hear my daughter cry and have to go be with her instead, God was no less present and at work in me. In fact, one of the major invitations in the Exercises is to find God in everything. If I can only find him in my prayer time, I am missing the point. If I can successfully pray about imitating Christ through being patient, and yet can’t be patient when the unexpected intrusions happen, then that may be an invitation to grow in patience. Faithful engagement in The Exercises isn’t the point; who we are becoming in Christ is, and that transformation isn’t limited to my “prayer time.”
OUR CONVERSATIONS WITH EACH OTHER HELP DEEPEN THE EXPERIENCE.
There is more to say, but this is the last one I will highlight today. The unique aspect of the way we are engaging the Exercises is that we are walking through them intentionally together as husband and wife. So once a week, we sit down and create space to process our experience of God, both within The Exercises and outside of them throughout the week. We take turns, letting one person share at a time, and our conversations have been rich. Hearing how Rachel has encountered God throughout the week has given me insight into her walk and places to hold in prayer through the coming week. Listening to her has also enriched my own walk. The way she contemplates scripture is different from the way I do. Rather than being a point of disconnect, those differences have felt like they added a whole new dimension to my relationship with God. We both feel like we make discoveries of our own as we share and as we listen to one another. We take time to pray for one another, and I can’t even describe the blessing it is to have Rachel just pray for me and my relationship with God.
In the coming weeks, we’ll share some more of our experience as well as some of what our other couples are experiencing, but we hope there may be something that sparks a new desire to cultivate or deepen an intentional spiritual journey with your spouse or a spiritual friend.